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The author postulates that the cloud will automate away low-level IT jobs, comparing the situation to automation in manufacturing.
I've been saying for awhile now that we're getting close to a crisis point in the IT world. The mid-tier IT worker is in imminent danger of being automated out of existence, and just like with the vanished factory jobs of the last 30 years, nobody wants to admit it's happening until it's too late.
[...] So how do you know if your job is going to disappear into the cloud? You don't really need me to tell you. You already feel it in your bones. Repetition is a sure warning sign. If you're building the same integrations, patching the same servers over and over again every day, congratulations – you've already become a robot. It's only a matter of time before a small shell script makes it official.
The solution is simple, but not easy: you simply must keep moving. If you don't know how to code, learn - like planting a tree, the best time to start was ten years ago, but the second best time is now. If your technical competence is ten years out of date, don't cling to your hard-won kingdom of decaying knowledge and sabotage any attempts at change: get out and pick up a certification, attend a meetup, something. Anything. At the end of the day, we're all self-taught engineers.
Otherwise, I'll tell you what will happen. The economy will take a small dip, or your department will get re-orged, and you will lose that job as an operations engineer on a legacy SaaS product. You'll look around for a similar job in your area and discover that nobody is hiring people anymore whose skill set is delivering a worse version of what AWS's engineers can do for a fraction of the cost. And by then you won't have the luxury of time to level up your skills.
I'm wondering how I craft an exit from this industry in the next handful of years.
https://forrestbrazeal.com/2019/01/16/cloud-irregular-the-creeping-it-apocalypse/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Tuesday January 22 2019, @11:31PM (1 child)
> The author postulates that the cloud will automate away low-level IT jobs, comparing the situation to automation in manufacturing.
The author is right. I saw the writing on the wall back in 2004 or so, when AWS first came out. I was a sysadmin for a smallish web company of around 40 people, back when making websites was profitable (you could charge £400 per single HTML page!) .
When AWS came out, first thing they tasked me to do was transfer all the infrastructure in their server room onto AWS. This required quite a bit of work in automated config management, stateless functioning, etc... but it was done.
Once finished, they shut down the local infrastructure. After which point I was superfluous to their needs, and was made redundant. Last I heard they also got rid of almost the entire local dev staff and shipped all the dev work over to India, leaving just the lawyers, accountants, project managers (remotely managing the Indians), and one star coder to fix the bugs in the outsourced code, integrate and deploy.
They were in many ways the first movers, and it paid off well for them. Costs dropped like a rock and profits soared. It drove home an important point. for 95% of businesses out there, IT is a cost centre at best. At worst they are that and a horrible pain in the arse on top. Non tech companies don't want to have IT departments, they don't want to be in the business of managing computing resources. They want to concentrate on their core business which makes them money. Computers for them are tools to implement their business process, and they don't care how it is done, or even if it is the best technical way to do it.
Back in the day, you had to have an IT department, you could not function without it. As soon as Amazon provided an alternative, people jumped on it. No more need for capital expenditure on machines, which deprecate after 5 years, and need constant maintenance. No need to hire sysadmins to sit there and babysit the system. With cloud it is easy to scale up and down with your requirements, and a simple ongoing cost looks good on the balance sheet vs massive capital investment that takes years to bear fruit.
So yeah, its on its way out. Just like people nowadays specialise in their jobs, we are now specialising compute resources to fewer tech companies for whom it is their business.
To be honest I am surprised that the transition isn't finished already. Outside of working for said cloud providers, only certain industries (e.g. Finance, Defense, Law) still have a need for dedicated, physical, in house staff.
I noticed in quite a few places, that what they now call the "sysadmin" is actually more what a helpdesk support person was in the mid 2000s. Someone with basic knowledge of scripting or the OS, while most of their skill is in support, installing/upgrading software, buying hardware for end users, and fixing cables/display/HID problems.
Most machines are not even administered anymore. With automation and VMs, snapshots and config management, a machine, when it starts misbehaving, is either rolled back to a last working snapshot, or it is wiped clean and rebuilt via config management. Apps are designed with this in mind, and can be reset and run without losing state (clustering and failover has gone a long way in allowing this).
It kind of makes sense, why waste a day debugging some obscure problem, or some system corruption, when you can wipe and rebuild in half an hour, and be back up and running. Sure, if you start getting repeated identical failures, then you investigate, but otherwise just carry on.
> I'm wondering how I craft an exit from this industry in the next handful of years.
I took the lesson from 2004 to heart, and have spent the last decade or so as an Automation Engineer. I actually go around automating myself out of the jobs I am hired into, and then get recommended into new jobs to automate myself out of those, and so on....
There seems to be a large amount of legacy out there, in need of automation. Even places which are not interested in public clouds like AWS, are moving to private clouds to make better use of standardised hardware clusters. In many cases their software and infrastructure needs to be modified to run in this new stateless way.
Then there are new startups that are growing fast, and don't have the in-house skill to do the whole config managed scalable deployment, so hire someone with experience to come in and set it up for them, document and provide training.
To be honest, the industry seems pretty dynamic at the moment, so I am not looking to exit. If in future it goes so bad that I can't find work, I can always fall back on a trade, be it a car mechanic, electrician or plumber. The last one in particular is not going anywhere (no matter how amazing and automated the future is, people will still need to bathe, drink and dispose of waste). Or I guess I could become a suit, get a MBA and go into management, but I don't think I have the right ethical constitution for that...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:36AM
One 3D print company seems to operate like that... except in the end they carry on without fixing things (eg. they rerender things even if not needed), removing functionality instead (designers getting overworked trying to find workarrounds is not important to them). They required multiple rounds of VC over the years (expensive locations didn't help), and I don't know for how long they will stay afloat (designers have a limit). Maybe this time is the one when they sink.